Inside the rows of tin-sided buildings in a beach-side suburb an hour out of Tokyo, aqua-green machines churn out the most basic of industrial components: pairs of inset steel rings that spin on a doughnut of balls or rollers.

The bearings produced by the NSK factory in Fujisawa may look a lot like the prototypes Leonardo da Vinci sketched five centuries ago, but the company still has plenty of costs. Its annual research budget of Y10bn (￡64m; €74m; $105m) supports a team of chemists who concoct recipes for grease – 60 of the 200 varieties NSK uses were developed in-house – and computer engineers whose software detects impurities in alloys. “You can buy cheap Chinese-made bearings that look just as good, but I wouldn't use them,” says Masatoshi Shirai, the plant's deputy manager.

Yet for all their quality, the plunge in global demand and a sharp rise in the yen have thrown Japanese manufacturers into crisis, and reignited a debate about the country's reliance on the sector. That is because it was not finance that transmitted this recession to Japan – it was manufacturing. In spite of having no real estate bubble or banking trauma to speak of, the slump in exports – down by half at their nadir in February – helped push output down by 14 per cent in annualised terms during the first quarter, making Japan's recession one of the deepest in the developed world.